A new approach to cluster finding and hit reconstruction in cathode pad chambers and its development for the forward muon spectrometer of ALICE

A new approach to cluster and hit finding in muon chambers of the ALICE forward spectrometer has been developed. The approach is based on the maximum likelihood-expectation maximization (MLEM) algorithm or Bayesian unfolding. The method allows improving the hit reconstruction accuracy for the background contaminated events by making use of the pad charge distribution deconvolution.